Posted
by
Soulskill
on Monday September 19, 2011 @02:46PM
from the cooler-heads-will-prevail dept.

dtjohnson writes "The 'Times Atlas of the World' claims, while publicizing its newest edition, that global warming has turned 15 percent of Greenland's former ice-covered land 'green and ice-free.' Now, however, scientists from the Scott Polar Research Institute say those figures, based on data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, are wrong. 'Recent satellite images of Greenland make it clear that there are in fact still numerous glaciers and permanent ice cover where the new Times Atlas shows ice-free conditions and the emergence of new lands,' they say in a letter that has been sent to the Times. Others have pointed out that if 15 percent of Greenland ice cover had been lost, then sea levels would have risen by 1 meter... which has not happened. Perhaps yet another climate controversy is brewing."
An update to the Sciencemag.com story pinpoints the probable source of the error: a 2001 map from the NSIDC illustrates Greenland's central ice sheet without showing any of the peripheral glaciers. The Atlas editors may have seen this map and misinterpreted it. Says the article, "Now glaciologists are left trying to figure out how not understate the importance of the extent glacial ice melt, while at the same time correcting the error."

I'm more than willing to stipulate GGP was Correct Insightful Flamebait:)

My problem with the whole CAGW "science" is that it fails to start off with your basic falsifiable hypothesis, without which, playing the science game is pretty much impossible. NGW and AGW (natural global warming and anthropogenic global warming), when asserted simply in a given direction without magnitude, are almost trivially true (as well as falsifiable). Once you decide to place a magnitude on it, your falsifiable hypothesis statement gets even more important to have - typically, this is glossed over and we get nothing but ad hoc special pleadings for any observation contrary to models.

We need another decade or two of study before we commit strongly either way. This will allow the science to be improved, and will (hopefully) cause the pop-culture aspect of the controversy to fade. The best thing that could happen for climate science is for both the public and the politicians to STOP CARING about it.